Best First Hours

First Hour Reviews

Looking back, Bionic Commando Rearmed may have been a more
important game than most realize. It was one of the first blockbuster
hits on both the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network digital
distribution models, scoring critical praise unlike any other console
downloadable before it. It also arguably opened the floodgates for the
proliferation of retro-styled games and HD remakes: more and more
publishers are digging up their buried treasure and giving it a
spit-shine worthy of the HD era, and just as many are building new
experiences from old foundations.

It goes without saying
that the company that spawned hundreds of Mega Man games would return to
a good thing, so I'm a little surprised it's taken over two years for
Capcom to follow up the original retro re-do. Bionic Commando Rearmed 2
is not quite the talk of the town in the same way the groundbreaking
original (erm, original remake) was, but I've been looking forward to it
since it was announced at last year's Captivate event. I'm rarely one
to complain about getting more of the same, especially when it's as
distinguished and polished as BCR was.

Some will cry foul at
"Rad" Spencer's newfound ability to jump (gasp!), but it hardly appears
to be the game-changer than many feared. Capcom has even affirmed that
the game can be completed without ever taking a hop. I think I'll put
that claim to the test for some of this first hour.

PS3 owners beware: Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 employs a type of DRM that requires you to start the game while connected to PlayStation Network. Inconvenient for a game that is played almost entirely offline.

Harvest Moon has been one of my favorite video games series, but with
as many Harvest Moon titles that have been released, there are bound to
be a few that just don't click with me. This has been happening more
often than I would like of late with my favorite farming simulator, and I
blame that on essentially the two different series Harvest Moon has
become. Ignoring all the spinoffs such as Rune Factory, Frantic Farming,
and Innocent Life, the series essentially split at the Back To
Nature/Friends of Mineral Town point about ten years ago.

Back to Nature for the PS1 was the first non-Nintendo Harvest Moon game and expanded on the previous console release, Harvest Moon 64.
An enhanced remake/port was released for the GBA titled Friends of
Mineral Town which I consider to be the quintessential Harvest Moon
title. But at this point, the PS2 and GameCube were out, and the
developers started going down the road of fancier 3D graphics on the
conoles while basically every portable iteration has been based on the
Friends of Mineral Town structure.

So what I call the portable Harvest Moon series is built on a very
solid set of gameplay elements: farming, foraging, mining, and
relationships. All aspects of the game are well-tuned and are balanced
decently. On the consoles, it's a completely different story: we get a
mish-mash of unbalanced, poorly tuned gameplay elements planted in a
boring looking 3D world. The console "series" has suffered like this
since Save the Homeland on the PS2, but I mostly blame A Wonderful Life,
the first Harvest Moon game I ever played that I really, truly hated.

Magical Melody, of course, falls into the console series. Released on the GameCube in 2006 and then re-released on the Wii in
2008, Magical Melody continues the sorry Harvest Moon console tradition
of not being very much fun. Whoops, did I spoil the first hour for you?

I've actually been sitting on this first hour review for an entire
year, I had it completely written except for this introduction. I'm not
really sure what I was waiting for; I think through a combination of
Magical Melody being an older, quite unexciting game combined with the
fact that it's a sorry game from one of my favorite series made me hold
off. But I really need to get it off my to-do list, so here you go, the
first hour of Harvest Moon: Magical Melody for the GameCube.

The video game industry isn't as surprising as we'd like to think. Sequels
rule the sales charts, and even new IPs tend to be paint jobs of
proven gameplay schemes. It's easy to point the finger at developers and
publishers, but let's take a look at a few of the bigger gambles that
companies have taken with their properties.

Back in 2001,
the first footage for the next Legend of Zelda caused some serious
uproar when, rather than an updated Ocarina of Time fantasy setting, the
new game went with a wholly cel-shaded, cartoony art style. Many had
been won over by the charming new Link by the game's release, but I
bet that just as many swore off Nintendo for good after this "kiddie"
debacle. Later in 2001, those who had recently purchased Metal
Gear Solid 2 were appalled to find the game had pulled a bait-and-switch,
tossing the series' longtime protagonist Solid Snake aside within the
first hour of the game for a never before seen pretty boy. The ensuing
explosion of discontent was megaton in proportion.

Nintendo and
Konami have had their share of death threats on message boards for these
switcheroos, and now it seems Capcom's neck is on the chopping block.
The long-rumored Devil May Cry 5 was finally made public at TGS 2010 as
"DmC," and fans were shocked to see that it would reboot the series with
a new, barely recognizable, adolescent punk version of cocky anti-hero
protagonist Dante. Further, Capcom itself isn't even spearheading the
development of the title, leaving Heavenly Sword developer Ninja Theory
in charge. The response has been
almost entirely negative.

Amidst all the noise on message
boards and in video comments, I realized I hadn't spent any quality time
with the old Dante myself, despite how much I enjoyed the modern Ninja
Gaiden action games that are often compared to the Devil May Cry series.
I borrowed a copy of the franchise's most acclaimed game, Devil May Cry
3 (which also happens to be the earliest in the series timeline) to
serve as my official introduction to the outrageous half-demon. It's
hard to empathize with the gamer rage that DMC fans feel at the moment,
but will I change my tune after walking a mile in the old Dante's boots?

I've managed to avoid shovelware pretty well over the years. I'm a knowledgeable gamer who's able to spot crap from four shelves away. But sometimes, games just land in your lap and you not only have no choice but to play it, you have to just to say you did and came out alive.

Emergency Heroes is that game, a semi-sandbox driving game that has you putting out fires, pulling over speeders, and clearing out traffic jams to save the day - all in terrific eight year old graphics with stellar voice actors found off the street wrapped in a hilariously bad SyFy Original Movie-like storyline.

Ubisoft released Emergency Heroes for the Wii in mid-2008, so this game has been burning up bargain bins for a while. I generally don't like Ubisoft for their DRM and other business practices, but I'm willing to make exceptions for exceptional games like this.

It can be fun to laugh at games like this though as long as the gameplay isn't frustrating. So will Emergency Heroes be a surprise and pull off an amazing first hour? Or will it be just what we all expect? Let's dive in and find out.

Mickey Mouse was never a big part of my early life. I guess that's to be
expected: my grandfather remembers seeing Mickey Mouse cartoons when he
was young, and a kids' cartoon character can only stay relevant for so
long. I've never been into the whole corruption-of-childhood-icons
thing, either. It always sort of struck me as puerile and cheap, like
finding a genitalia-spacecraft dogfight penciled into the margins of a
social studies textbook.

So when I first saw the Game Informer
cover art for a dark take on Disney called Epic Mickey, I scoffed. I'd
never imagined such a thing would exist, and I couldn't fathom it being
worth a damn. I let out an unapproving sigh as I skimmed over the
concept art in the magazine, featuring mechanical perversions of classic
Disney characters. The designs themselves didn't bother me beyond their
tired post-apocalyptic, steampunk styles, but the concept itself seemed
like something a goth 7th grader might come up with after being dragged
to Disney World by his family.

As it turns out, all of that
imagery was just pre-production concept, used in the magazine to create
as much hype as the shock value could muster. The final product has a
safer appearance, one that most would say is more "tame." I think it's
just less gimmicky. Further details would catch my interest as well,
including the use of forgotten Disney properties to create an off-kilter
gameworld (rather than just a dark one) and the moral freedom system
that's supervised by a guy who excels at that sort of thing.

It's
been a strange hype cycle, but Epic Mickey has finally arrived. For the
first time, I'm actually anticipating a Mickey Mouse property. Is my
newfound interest warranted, or should I have left it in the trash with
that issue of Game Informer?

I once owned an Xbox for what it was intended: to play games. Now it sits under just about every television in my house as an excellent, but dated, media center running XBMC. Games have taken up about 1% of its total processing power over its life.

But at one point, it was the darling of my dorm room with Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. There was another game though that caught our attention, and that was Fable. I have no idea what originally drove me towards this game, but I pre-ordered Fable from GameStop and even received some throwaway bonus DVD that I would never watch.

Three of us in our house played Fable, and we all played different classes (warrior, mage, and archer) which made for three entirely diverse 15 hour gaming experiences. My roommate could one-shot werewolves from across the map and my other roommate’s hero looked to be about 150 years old after draining his body from excessive magic use. My warrior was scarred and muscular; I’d like to say that these avatars represented us in real life, but that would be a stretch.

Fable 2’s release, like many games this generation, came and went for me without much notice. I’m trying to be much more selective with what I played, and while I enjoyed my first Fable experience, I wasn’t that interested in returning to Albion.

But in time-honored First Hour tradition, with Fable 3 just released a few months ago, it is now time to play Fable 2. Here is its first hour.

When I think back to the first time I saw Sonic the Hedgehog running on
the Genesis (which I wasn't yet familiar with), I recall marveling at
how much better it looked than the Mario games I had at home. I remember
the time my brother tried to explain Super Mario 64 to me, and how
little I understood what he was saying until I finally witnessed it in
action. When I brought home a Gamecube the morning it launched, I was
impressed with the speed and fluidity of the Death Star trench run that
began Rogue Leader, at least when compared to its predecessor on the
N64. But the first time I saw Call of Duty 2 at Toys R Us on an HDTV
screen, the only thought that ran through my mind was...

"Really? This is next-gen?"

Yes,
the characters were constructed of more polygons. And the textures were
clearer. And of course, the higher resolution made everything easier to
see. But I just couldn't help but feel a little disappointed, seeing
that the the game, and others in the 360 launch library, just didn't
seem to bring any worthwhile improvements to the table. In fact, it
wasn't until the first time I saw Lost Planet's smoking RPG trails,
gorgeous boss monsters, and swarms of flying enemies that the feeling of
a new generation really sank in.

On the other hand, many
quality games are released at the end of a console's life cycle, once
developers have a firmer grasp on the intricacies of the hardware. It is
unfortunate that they're often overlooked for the next console's rushed
launch titles, but that's reality. EA's Criterion studio, creators of
the high-octane Burnout series, attempted to buck that trend with Black,
a first-person shooter
for the PS2 and Xbox that was marketed as a next-gen shooter for
current-gen platforms.

The game certainly looked
impressive the first time I saw a friend playing it, some five years
ago. Does it still pack a punch, or will Black forever be lost between
generations?

Nine years ago, I introduced myself to an interesting little RPG from Japan for the Game Boy Advance. Little did I know, I was playing what would eventually become, arguably, my favourite RPG of all time. That game was Golden Sun, and many other gamers around the world shared my passion. The game ended, but the story was only half-over; it continued in a sequel, Golden Sun: The Lost Age, two years later. The sequel couldn’t have come any sooner; waiting that long for a continuation, for Golden Sun fans, was torture. Turns out that was nothing...

Sometime after The Lost Age’s launch, we learned that the Takahashi brothers’ creations were merely the prologue to a supposed saga of games set in the Golden Sun universe. Fans were frothing at the mouths with anticipation, but, unbeknownst to them, would have to wait seven long years before seeing another sequel. That wait is finally over.

Classifying video games into genres can be a tricky ordeal. For
example, let's look at Fable.
It's a role-playing game because it uses
dynamic statistics as modifiers to its core mechanics, right? But one of
the
traditional indicators of an RPG video game is that it plays out with
little regard to nuanced player input: its action is menu driven and
often
turn based. Fable's real-time combat, on the other hand, relies on
player dexterity (as in an Action game) as much as it does the
quantifications of the battle engine. So, in our propensity to create
subgenres when things don't fit so neatly, we just call it an Action
RPG. However, it's hard to be satisfied with this conclusion when one
could replace every instance of "Fable" in this paragraph with "BioShock," "Mass Effect," or even "Star Ocean" and it would be no less true, even if all of these
games feel completely different in once you get your hands on the
controller.

Okay, so there's obviously a problem when so many games in the same
genre are so dissimilar. But what about when a game comes along and has
no precedent to compare to? Case in point, where the hell does the Trauma Center series belong?

Trauma
Center: Under the Knife arrived on the scene in the Nintendo DS launch
window, requiring players to perform lightspeed surgeries using a
variety of medical instruments through the handheld's touch screen.
Ignoring the dearth of surgery games (or even touch screen games) to use
as precedent, Trauma Center was still very tough to define. Can we
really use the catchall Simulation genre for a game where heart surgery
lasts all of a minute and Space Invaders can be found in the patient's
lungs? Is it part visual novel merely because operations are bookended
and pervaded by character portraits and dialogue? Not content to let us
try and figure it out after four games, Atlus' fifth title in the
franchise, Trauma Team, complicates things further by providing six
different scenarios to play through, each with its own exploration
within (and sometimes a bit outside) the traditional Trauma Center
structure.

Okay, so I don't really know what to call it. A
more important concern, though, is whether or not it's fun. So how did
my first hour go with this...whatever it is?

New genres don't come around that often, but genre mash-ups have been popular lately. Mirror's Edge
is a first person platformer, with a dash of shooting and a few heaps
of parkour thrown in for good measure. Plenty of first person shooters
have tried to integrate platforming, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
immediately jumps to mind, but that was a disaster. Mirror's Edge takes
what works from a game like Assassin's Creed with its assisted climbing
and fluid action and sticks it in a first person view.

To some,
this may sound great, others are undoubtedly skeptical, the rest of you
have already played this two year old game and made up your own mind
(nobody ever said the First Hour was timely *groan*). I've been
intrigued by Mirror's Edge since its release, but the opportunity to
play it never came up until Steam had it on sale
for about $5 earlier this year. So I bought it and tossed it on my
proverbial digital backlog, only to finally get around playing it now
when my brother-in-law lent me his copy on the Xbox 360. No, I didn't
play it on the Xbox, but it did encourage me to finally get around to it
on the PC (odd how that works).

So here's my first hour review of Mirror's Edge, Steve previously wrote a full review on the game with a stunning gallery of self-taken screenshots at the bottom.